POETRY FROM PARADISE VALLEY

POETRY FROM PARADISE VALLEY web page

Pecan Grove Press has released an anthology of poems, a sampling of works published in Valparaiso Poetry Review during its first decade, from the original 1999-2000 volume to the 2009-2010 volume.

Poetry from Paradise Valley includes a stellar roster of 50 poets. Among the contributors are a former Poet Laureate of the United States, a winner of the Griffin International Prize, two Pulitzer Prize winners, two National Book Award winners, two National Book Critics Circle winners, six finalists for the National Book Award, four finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Award, two finalists for the Pulitzer Prize, and a few dozen recipients of other honors, such as fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, etc.

Best Books of Indiana 2011: Finalist. Judges' Citation: "Poetry from Paradise Valley is an excellent anthology that features world-class poetry, including the work of many artists from the Midwest, such as Jared Carter, Annie Finch, David Baker, and Allison Joseph. It’s an eclectic and always interesting collection where poems on similar themes flow into each other. It showcases the highest caliber of U. S. poetry." —Indiana Center for the Book, Indiana State Library

Monday, March 23, 2009

Sylvia Plath and Nicholas Hughes: Mother and Son

When I heard the sad news yesterday about the suicide of Nicholas Hughes, the 47-year-old son of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, I found it difficult to connect the man that had become a successful ecologist—who specialized for more than two decades in studies of salmon behavior and their patterns of feeding or who held a position as professor of fisheries and ocean sciences at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks—with the images of him depicted as the infant son in the Plath volumes on one of my bookshelves. Like many others, until now my familiarity with Nicholas Hughes existed solely from information in Plath’s poetry and her journals.

Frequently, my students and I discuss the ways poets might still moments in their works and preserve timeless images, mostly for beneficial results. Additionally, we often discuss the ethics and consequences of writing about family members or friends, usually engaging in conversations that constantly raise issues never fully resolved, especially when the individuals about whom they are writing might be identifiable in the poetry. Even when the work does not contain material obviously painful or embarrassing, the effects on those who are subjects of the poetry sometimes remain unpredictable.

In the unique case of someone like Nicholas Hughes, whose parents’ poetry and personal relationships have been legendary in the ongoing chronicles of contemporary literature, such a situation must have been extremely challenging. The intimate circumstances surrounding Sylvia Plath’s own 1963 suicide—including the proximity of her small children in an adjoining room and the history of her husband’s blatant infidelities, as well as the eventual suicide of his mistress, who also took her child’s life—have caused continuing conversation and debate now for nearly half a century. Indeed, the life and death of Sylvia Plath were portrayed in a Hollywood film starring Gwyneth Paltrow in 2003.

Nevertheless, upon learning of Nicholas Hughes’s death, I chose to return to those books on my shelves written by Sylvia Plath, hoping to find a moment when she and Nicholas were just mother and son—a time when Sylvia, Ted, and their newborn son provided a degree of joy for one another. In her journal from 1962, Plath describes the birth of Nicholas:

“Here he is!” I heard Ted say. It was over. I felt the great weight gone in a minute. I felt thin, like air, as if I would float away, and perfectly awake. I lifted my head and looked up. “Did he tear me to bits?” I felt I must be ripped and bloody from all that power breaking out of me. “Not a scratch,” said Nurse D. I couldn’t believe it. I lifted my head and saw my first son, Nicholas Farrar Hughes, blue and glistening on the bed a foot from me, in a pool of wet, with a cross, black frown and oddly low, angry brow, looking up at me, frown-wrinkles between his eyes and his blue scrotum and penis large and blue, as if carved on a totem. Ted was pulling back the wet sheets and Nurse D. mopping up the great amounts of water that had come with him.

Then the nurse wrapped the baby up and put him in my arms. Doctor Webb arrived. It had happened at 5 minutes to midnight. The clock struck 12. The baby squirmed and cried, warm in the crook of my arm . . ..

Plath continues in her journal to narrate frankly a hesitancy in her immediate responses to the infant’s presence. “We had a son. I felt no surge of love. I wasn’t sure I liked him. His head bothered me, the low brow.” However, after her doctor explains the baby’s odd-shaped brow as a temporary state caused by the birth process, and she seems relieved, Plath writes: “Everything was beautiful and neat and calm. The baby washed and dressed in his carrycot, so silent I had Ted get up and make sure he was breathing. The nurse said goodnight. It felt like Christmas Eve, full of rightness & promise.”

Writing on the following morning, Plath declares she feels “wonderful,” and she describes admiring her new son: “I felt very proud of Nicholas, and fond. It had taken a night to be sure I liked him—his head shaped up beautifully—the skull plates had overlapped to get him through the boney door, and filled out, a handsome male head with a black brain-shelf. Dark, black-blue eyes, a furze of hair like a crewcut.”

Perhaps the poem, “Nick and the Candlestick,” which appeared in Sylvia Plath’s posthumous collection, Ariel and Other Poems, supplies a better-known piece by Plath concerning the birth of her son. Eileen M. Aird suggests in Sylvia Plath: The Critical Heritage, edited by Linda W. Wagner, that the poem “encompasses the painful world of the creative imagination and the potential dangers of the man-made world but is able to move beyond both in the affirmation of the mother’s love for the child.” She observes the poem’s structure, “where each image, almost each word of the first half, finds its echo in the second half and the joy of the ending does not evade the pain of the first half—baby and mother have not escaped from the subterranean cave, only hung it with soft roses; and the mercuric atoms still drip into the terrible well.”

The poem is read with passion in the video above and briefly commented upon by Seph Rodney, who chose “Nick and the Candlestick” in the Favorite Poem Project begun by Robert Pinsky as Poet Laureate of the United States in 1999.

NICK AND THE CANDLESTICK

I am a miner. The light burns blue.Waxy stalactitesDrip and thicken, tears

The earthen wombExudes from its dead boredom.Black bat airs

Wrap me, raggy shawls,Cold homicides.They weld to me like plums.

Old cave of calciumIcicles, old echoer.Even the newts are white,

Those holy Joes.And the fish, the fish—Christ! They are panes of ice,

A vice of knives,A piranhaReligion, drinking

Its first communion out of my live toes.The candleGulps and recovers its small altitude,

This is probably my favorite poem by Plath. Strangely, the lines were going through my head one morning as I was driving to work(I'm pregnant and the dark/light aspects of the poem resonate powerfully). I learned later that afternoon of Nicholas Hughes's death, and felt devastated.

This was a gorgeous reading of the poem -- hearing it this way made me feel good about it again.

Dark Refuge (Whale Sound, 2011)

Click Image for Audio Chapbook

Recent Release

DARK REFUGE

Dark Refuge, a sequence of poems in an audio chapbook and online text, is now available for free, as well as an mp3 recording, e-book copy, and pdf file of the poetry. A print edition of the book and a cd may also be ordered.

SEEDED LIGHT (Turning Point, 2010)

Best Books of Indiana 2011: Finalist. Judges' Citation:"As the title implies, [Seeded Light] includes many poems where nature plays an important part. An emphasis on human relationships intertwines with natural description to give these poems philosophical and emotional depths. Byrne brings to life an old family farm gone fallow, a visit to an inn where the speaker spent his honeymoon, and Lester Young playing tenor sax." —Indiana Center for the Book, Indiana State Library

" ... is memorial and social, scenic and intimate ..."—David Baker

" ... offers abundant evidence of a mind’s alertness to the world of nature and to modern urban reality ..."—Alfred Corn

"... as mysterious and elusive as the permutations of light and shadow for which Byrne has such a canny eye ... subtly virtuosic displays of rhyme, alliteration, and assonance ..."—Frank WilsonThe Philadelphia Inquirer

"Rich, shaded, and subtle in texture, with second lines often bleeding into the next couplet, these open couplets expand meaning, encouraging the reader to follow."—Zara RaabPoemeleon

"... there is always light, from the slimmest of glimmers to full moony illumination, and it is that light, seeded throughout, that we will remember, long after we close the pages and turn off the lamp."—Barbara CrookerRattle

"The liveliness of any art, Byrne implicitly and convincingly argues, depends on union of emotion and intellect, design and accident."—Lesley WheelerThe Adirondack Review

“These poems take readers on very human journeys through translucent landscapes where the world is in some way in balance, or in touch, with what we are. They especially lend themselves to meditative reading, and their gift is a sense of deepened understanding of and participation in the natural world.”—Janet McCannYanaguana Literary Review

"What makes Byrne's poems memorable is his control of plain language that serves as a guiding light."—JL KatoTipton Poetry Journal

ORDER NUMBERED & SIGNED COPIES OF SEEDED LIGHT

Seeded Light (Turning Point Books, 2010) is Edward Byrne's sixth collection of poetry. The refined poems of this volume invite the reader into a spacious world . . .

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About "One Poet's Notes"

"One Poet's Notes" presents ongoing personal commentary by a poet/editor about contemporary poetry, fiction, and criticism, as well as various other issues relating to the literary arts, and it is intended to complement content in the semiannual publications, Valparaiso Poetry Review and Valparaiso Fiction Review.

Collections selected for discussion in this editor's blog include distinguished works published in the last few years by small presses, university presses, or major publishing houses.

Edward Byrne

About Me

Edward Byrne is the author of eight collections of poetry, most recently a trilogy of volumes: TIDAL AIR (Pecan Grove Press, 2002), SEEDED LIGHT (Turning Point Books, 2010), and TINTED DISTANCES (Turning Point Books,2011). DARK REFUGE (2011), an audio chapbook offering a sequence of poems from AUTISM: A POEM, is available from Whale Sound. He has also edited two anthologies of poetry, including POETRY FROM PARADISE VALLEY (Pecan Grove Press, 2010). In addition, his essays of literary criticism have been published in various journals and book collections, including MARK STRAND (Chelsea House Publishers), edited by Harold Bloom; A CONDITION OF THE SPIRIT: THE LIFE AND WORK OF LARRY LEVIS (Eastern Washington University Press), edited by Christopher Buckley and Alexander Long; “Claudia Emerson: Literary Criticism” in POETRY FOR STUDENTS (Thomson Gale Publishing), edited by Ira Mark Milne; and DAVID BOTTOMS: CRITICAL ESSAYS AND INTERVIEWS (McFarland & Co.), edited by William Walsh. He is a professor in the English Department at Valparaiso University, where he serves as editor of VALPARAISO POETRY REVIEW and co-editor of VALPARAISO FICTION REVIEW.
Contact: Edward.Byrne@Valpo.Edu

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Each week One Poet's Notes will try to highlight work by a poet selected from the issues of Valparaiso Poetry Review. According to the children's rhyme, "Tuesday's child is full of grace." Therefore, graceful poems from VPR's issues will be featured on Tuesdays except when other posts with news or updates preempt the usual appearance of this item.